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Wednesday, July 20, 2005

Unusual things are happening in the feminist world. The Hungarian representative to UN’s Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) said that, in the future, abortion will be viewed by women in the same way that torture is now viewed by human rights advocates. Now, given how often the UN turns a blind eye to torture, Saddam Hussein’s regime being a fine example of the carefully shielded glance, we may justifiably wonder if this means torture will become acceptable or abortion unacceptable. But even so, the possibility that CEDAW members are beginning to question the practice is telling.

The reasons are not too difficult to find. Within the last month, headlines have revealed:

Danco Laboratories, maker of the abortifacient drug RU 486 (Mifeprex) is changing the labels that appear on the drugs to include updated safety information. Why? Well, five women have died from using their product. Given that four of these five deaths were reported in California, there is growing suspicion that the number of national deaths is rather deeply under-reported.

Canada’s public health department warned doctors to restrict access to Depo-Provera. It seems the drug causes massive and possibly permanent bone loss in the women who take it. Depo-Provera is a common form of abortifacient birth control for teens and young women – the very group that is supposed to be building up the solid calcium they need to survive old age without osteoporosis.

The Associated Press reports the birth control patch (also an abortifacient) causes thrombosis, potentially deadly clots in the deep veins, lungs, heart or brain, twenty times as often as the birth control pill.

Given that the pill itself puts women at increased risk for thrombosis, this is hardly good news. But, the news is doubly damning since it has just been verified that the low-dose birth control pill increases the rate of heart attack and stroke to a much greater extent than previously understood.

New studies have demonstrated that women who have abortion have drug abuse rates, accident rates, suicide rates and higher morbidity and mortality rates overall than the general population. This merely confirms what has been known for over five years: women who carry to term, on the other hand, have lower morbidity and mortality rates than the general female population.

Meanwhile, not a few Democrats are considering jettisoning the radical left-wing of the party by removing the staunchly pro-abortion plank of their platform.

Ever since the 1974 authorization of National Security Study Memorandum 200 (NSSM 200), American foreign policy has been built around sterilizing the population of other countries, even as it kills its own women and children through massive application of hormonal contraceptives and abortion. Now, thirty years later, the result has been a world-wide fertility decline never before seen in human history.

As the population of every industrialized country in the world rapidly ages, as the aged and disabled have begun to be systematically euthanized and the specter of depopulation haunts Japan, Europe and eventually North America, some people are beginning to wake up.

“Perhaps,” some of them have begun to say to themselves and, ever so quietly, to one another, “perhaps this approach is not the best.”

Tuesday, July 12, 2005

To the south, east and west, Spain is bounded by water. Even at its narrowest point, at the straits of Gibralter, ten miles of ocean separates Spain from her nearest neighbor. To the north, the Pyranees mountain chain forms a continuous natural obstacle from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean, with several peaks rising over 5,000 feet.

England is even worse. It is a fortress completely surrounded by water, with the English Channel twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest point. Due to decades of violence from the northern Ireland conflict, it has more surveillance cameras than any other country in the world, roughly one half million operating in London alone. Indeed, the average Londoner is caught on film over 300 times per day.

Yet, rather than considering these facts, Americans persist in believing that a six-foot cyclone fence would serve as a real deterrent to illegal immigration and – purportedly the real problem – terrorists.

The idea is absurd. Was illegal immigration the root of the problem for Spain a year ago or for London a few days ago? Was it even really the problem for the United States on September 11?

No, it wasn’t. We have all been watching too many Humphrey Bogart movies. Illegal immigration, spies smuggled into the country through clandestine means, this is not the source of the bombs or the men who planted them. By focussing on illegal immigration, we ignore the real problem.

Consider the terrorist’s situation from his point of view. In order to be a successful terrorist, I must blend into the society I intend to harass, wound and kill. I must raise the fewest possible questions about my origin and purpose. To be successful, I must become a non-entity, someone seen but never noticed.

If this is my goal, then I have a few rules of conduct. First, I must enter the country legally if at all possible. After all, to enter illegally, I must transit through small border towns where I attract attention if only because I am a stranger. I must negotiate with natives who do not share my objectives or my beliefs, men who are interested only in money and their own safety, men who would sell me out for the cash reward in a heartbeat if they somehow realized who I was or what I intended.

And how could I avoid betraying myself? I trained to simulate life in America, not life in Mexico or Canada. Why invest months of additional training to transit through an area I will only be present in for weeks at best?

Even if I were successfully smuggled into a country, I must obtain forged papers and present these to every person who requests them, never knowing who will see through the forgeries. To obtain the papers, I must again often deal with people who are not part of my organization: known criminals, people already being watched by the police.

Why go through this trouble? It is much better to enter the country legally, with real documents, never needing to come into contact with the American criminal class. That way, I can stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the anti-immigrant crowd, vocally chastising those who seem uninterested in securing “our” borders with barbed wire. With such a cover, I can cry, “Look over there!” and you will look over there while I go about my business.

Many years ago, B. Liddell Hart wrote a classic on warfare called Strategy. In it, he pointed out that natural obstacles are no obstacle at all. Never in the history of warfare has a moat, a mountain chain or a fence stopped persons who were seriously interested in breaching the defense. The key to successful warfare is to hit the enemy where he is not and to lure him into a place where he cannot effectively use what he has.

So, we could build a fence. Better yet, we could dig a moat. But our moat would be measured in feet, not miles, and it wouldn’t stop people determined to get in. It would simply put resources where they cannot be effectively used.

No, illegal immigrant is not the problem and it never will be. It is the legal immigrant who poses the first threat. An even worse threat is posed by the American-born citizen who has become convinced of the rightness of the enemy’s cause.

So, here’s the question we need to answer: how high do you suppose the walls would have to be to separate each of us from the rest – all for our own safety, of course?

Wednesday, July 06, 2005

With the upcoming nomination to replace Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, we are witnessing a return to one of the founding principles originally envisioned for American government. Notice that this is just a return to the principles – the founders of the country would no longer recognize the government.

The Original Plan

As many people know, the Constitution was not originally set up as a democracy. Rather, it was established as a republic. What’s the difference? The people in a democracy vote directly on every major issue while those in a republic elect representatives who then exercise power in their name. In the beginning, the United States used some elements of democratic rule but left the primary exercise of power in the hands of representatives.

The original plan specified one member of the House of Representatives for every thirty thousand people. If we had stuck to that, we would have a House of Representatives with roughly ten thousand members.

Likewise, in the original plan, senators were not elected directly by the people. Rather, the people elected their own state legislatures. The state legislature, in turn, chose the senators who would represent the whole state in the Senate. While this indirect method of appointing senators was thrown out in 1913, it is still used to determine the president of the United States. Many voters are under the illusion that they vote directly for a presidential candidate, but it is not so. They actually vote for an elector, a member of the Electoral College. The college of electors chooses the president.

In the same way, the federal judiciary is a creation of the Congress and is therefore filled by indirect election. We don’t vote for judges directly, instead, we choose people who in turn fill the judicial positions, much as used to be the case with senators. The difference, of course, is that senators serve for a period of six years, presidents for four, judges for life.

Today's Plan

Originally, we had three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial, with the last being intentionally made the weakest. Today, we have one branch of government, the judicial, with three auxiliary branches: the executive, the legislative, and the corporative.

The executive and legislative branches bow to the authority of the judicial branch. They do not exercise authority on their own, except as the judicial branch gives them leave. Since the federal judiciary is a creation of the legislative branch, we now have a Frankenstein government, a government in which the creator has lost control of his creation.

Since the judiciary is the only real source of power in America, the indirect election of judges through a republican system should be a source of comfort to all concerned. True, the term is for life, not four or six years, the government is by nine people, not thousands, and there remains not even a semblance of the idea that the judges represent the interests of any of the electorate but the forms are observed. We have maintained the idea of the republic – sort of.

But it can’t last. The judiciary is slowly giving away its own power to its own creation, the last branch of government, the corporation. The irony is delicious.

The New Plan

The modern corporation was created by the judiciary in its 1886 decision Santa Clara County v. the Southern Pacific Railroad. By making corporations full legal persons, “the government of the people, by the people and for the people” took on a whole new twist.

Corporations are elected to power directly by the people through a fiscal vote, in which the corporations are given money in exchange for entertainment and creature comforts. In return, the corporation dictates preferences through its advertising branch, the media. The preferences it permits us to hold are not limited to the purchase of goods and services, rather, they create and embody an entire world-view.

Like the modern federal government, the point of the corporation is to separate money from the consumer as efficiently as possible. Teenagers and children, having little wisdom or foresight, are the most easily separated from their money. Thus, it is in the interest of both the government (i.e., the judiciary) and the corporation to maintain a juvenile culture. But this creates a fatal weakness in the judiciary that is being exploited.

If any American can grow up to be President, and a corporation is a full person, then the corporation can grow up to be President. As full persons, corporations have the right to rule. By granting corporations the right of eminent domain formerly retained solely by the legislature, the judiciary is completing the work it began in 1886. It is recognizing the right of persons to enjoy a share of power. It doesn't recognize that it no longer controls the situation.

The growth of a bureaucratic culture allowed the legislature to be emasculated by the judiciary. The growth of an entertainment culture will allow the judiciary to be emasculated by the corporation. Just as the judiciary began as the weakest branch of government but has become the strongest, so corporations are actually being transformed into the government right before our eyes.

Corporations will attain this power because we the people will vote them into power. The courts, having been duly appointed by the legislators, will in turn appoint to the corporations the power to govern us, the power to take everything we own, just so long as they keep us comfortable and entertained.

Friday, July 01, 2005

"Proclaim ye this among the nations: Prepare war, raise up the strong: let them come, let all the men of war come up. Cut your ploughshares into swords, and your spades into spears. Let the weak say: I am strong.Break forth, and come, all ye nations from round about, and gather yourselves together: there will the Lord cause all thy strong ones to fall down. Let them arise, and let the nations come up into the valley of Josaphat: for there I will sit to judge all nations round about." (Joel 3:10-12)

Everyone quotes Isaiah, but no one ever quotes Joel.

Now we will see if the Republican party can be trusted or if a new party needs to be formed.